Coca-Cola has been consistently ranked as one of the most innovative digital marketers in China, with 2013’s Nickname Bottle campaign often cited for its effectiveness in creating awareness and brand engagement.

Coke’s Lyric Bottle mobile site encourages sharing to friends.

The brand followed up the effort with the Lyric Bottle campaign in the summer of 2014, releasing over 50 limited-edition bottles and cans with lyrics from popular Chinese songs in an effort to inspire a new form of social sharing in the form of WeChat-friendly musical emoticons called “musicons.”

Campaign Highlights

The Lyric Bottle campaign leveraged celebrity campaign ambassadors and trending topics to inspire sharing through Coca-Cola’s brand channels. While Weibo was the primary platform for awareness through KOL and celebrity integrations, the brand drove user engagement on WeChat where QR-code scanning unlocked “musicians” that could be shared with friends or through the Moments feed.

What You’ll Learn

The Coca-Cola Social Campaign Report will review how the brand built upon the enormous success of 2014’s “nickname bottle” campaign with the addition of pop star collaborations, QR-code scanning, and “musicon” (musical emoticon) sharing on WeChat.

Weibo: Coca-Cola used Weibo to create initial momentum for the campaign through incentive engagements and multiple levels of KOL integration.

WeChat: Coca-Cola placed QR codes on each bottle which could be scanned through WeChat to open a campaign minisite with each musicon made available for sharing.

Campaign Microsite: A campaign microsite aggregated social sharing activities and linked to brand ecommerce on YHD.com.

Key Opinion Leaders: To inspire organic sharing on social media, Coca-Cola partnered with a wide range of celebrities, key opinion leaders, and digital influencers to boost visibility of lyric bottles on social media.